In Time of Peril

Edmund Blair Leighton exhibited In Time of Peril at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1897, near the height of his public popularity as one of Victorian England's most accomplished painters of medieval romance and chivalric narrative. Leighton had built his reputation through the 1880s and 1890s producing meticulously researched scenes drawn from Arthurian legend, troubadour poetry, and the codes of courtly love; works such as God Speed (1900) and The Accolade (1901) would follow in the same vein. By 1897, the broader Pre-Raphaelite movement that had inspired his subject matter was fading as a dominant force, but Leighton and his contemporaries sustained public appetite for its imagery through technically assured, narratively legible paintings that satisfied both the Victorian taste for historical authenticity and for romantic sentiment. In Time of Peril reflects this moment precisely: the stonework and armor are archaeologically plausible, the emotional tenor is heightened and theatrical, and the painting's composition (structured around the tension between flight and pursuit, safety and danger) rewards sustained looking in a way that purely decorative work does not. The painting belongs to a tradition of Victorian narrative realism applied to medieval subject matter, a genre that would largely disappear with the century it represented.